Kill Anything That Moves

The Real American War in Vietnam

By Nick Turse

(Metropolitan; 370 pages; $30)

In early 1971, the New York Times Book Review splashed its cover with the question "Should We Have War Crimes Trials?" American perceptions of the war in Vietnam were at a sort of tipping point, and the military was nervous. A retired general and respected prosecutor at Nuremberg argued in the Times and on "The Dick Cavett Show" that Gen. William Westmoreland might be guilty of war crimes. "[O]ur army that now remains in Vietnam," a colonel wrote at the time, "is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers ... drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous."

As Nick Turse tells it in his indispensable new history of the war, challenges to the military's perceptions of the conflict, which it pretended to be winning every day for years, started with Seymour Hersh's groundbreaking account of the My Lai massacre. American soldiers murdered 500 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968, and after Hersh's exposé, suddenly war crimes were a hot story. For a moment. But Turse insists that if the editors of Newsweek hadn't "eviscerated" an article that described a much larger death toll in 1972, the wool wouldn't still be pulled over Americans' eyes.

The problem, as described in Turse's "Kill Anything That Moves," is the tension between the "bad apples" argument - which sees atrocities in Vietnam as the exception - and the reality of the broader, official "American way of war." Turse came to understand the latter after he stumbled onto documents of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The military created the group after the My Lai massacre to avoid again being caught flat-footed.

The point, Turse found, was not to prevent war crimes but to contain the damage and stay, as the euphemism might go today, ahead of the PR problem. Finding the cache of internal documents, Turse halted his academic thesis work, and lit out in his car to spend the next several days photocopying these documents. He rounded this out with interviews with more than 100 veterans, alongside those of eyewitnesses and survivors of American atrocities in Vietnam. His verdict - more than a decade later - is damning and masterful.

Without knowing its name, Americans understand what a free-fire zone is. Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have essentially made large swaths of Pakistan into them. As Turse recounts, the practice seems to have originated in Vietnam (though no doubt there are earlier precedents in, for instance, the American wars against Indians).

A free-fire zone in Vietnam, as American soldiers understood it, was where all inhabitants were deemed to be the enemy. They could therefore be killed at will (or raped, mutilated, kidnapped, tortured, used to find and explode land mines). Arbitrarily, too: for running as American soldiers approached, for wearing black, for having safety shelters under their houses, for merely being - all Vietnamese in these zones were fair game (the term used was VC, Viet Cong or Victor Charlie).

The practice was so liberating of some soldiers' latent sadism that, when questioned over the use of deadly force, some even insisted that nonofficial free-fire zones were free-fire zones. Likewise, obsession over the body count (in light of American racism and what soldiers called "the mere-gook rule") also led to abuses. Turse finds in the documents that official policy held that if more "VC" could be killed than replaced, this would stand for "winning." If you add to this the internal military survey of officers' understanding of the Geneva Conventions, which found that more than 96 percent of Marine second lieutenants would torture at will to get information, then the "fog of war" comes into sharper focus.

Seemingly for most of the war, Turse writes, the military largely ignored its own investigations into war crimes, ignored or downplayed the testimony of up-standers and whistle-blowers who spoke out for Vietnamese victims of American murders, rapes and massacres, and ignored huge numbers of "enemy" kills taken with no weapons, which had to be turned over to the military.

The pressure for kills led officers like Julian Ewell to train his underlings in the no-risk, relatively sterile if brutal practice of killing from the air. Ewell repeatedly shouted things like, "Jack up that body count, or you're gone, Colonel." Ewell's body-count binge in one of the most populated parts of the country, the Mekong Delta, was code-named Operation Speedy Express. It would culminate in a ratio of 134 KIAs (or killed in action) to every American soldier killed. The problem was that even according to the military's own findings, and Ewell's own soldiers, easily more than half of these thousands of KIAs were civilians.

What it all amounted to - as Turse makes clear, and as reporters for Newsweek would find - was essentially an official policy of ongoing My Lais on a monthly, if not weekly (or more frequent) basis. By the time Newsweek ran its highly edited follow-up to the courageous Times Book Review piece, the U.S. military had mastered the art of intimidating whistle-blowers, of punishing rank-and-file soldiers in courts-martial but then unilaterally dismissing the charges, of abridging or trivializing punishments, and of disparaging honest reporters and whistle-blowers.

In one case, the pressure seems to have led one honest military investigator, Maj. Carl Hensley, to suicide. "The whole Pentagon strategy centered on portraying My Lai as a one-off aberration, rather than part of a consistent pattern of criminality resulting from policies at the top."

"Kill Anything That Moves" is a paradigm-shifting, connect-the-dots history of American atrocities that reads like a thriller; it will convince those with the stomach to read it that all these decades later Americans, certainly the military brass and the White House, still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam - which was that billions were spent to wantonly slaughter as many as 2 million civilians, and that this slaughter was the official policy.

"Whatever remains unconscious emerges later as fate," wrote psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Given today's killings from the air, whole zones made up of enemies who are enemies for simply living in a certain area, the impunity of it, Jung was clearly onto something.

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